Sonic Youth

A festival of composers under forty defies categorization.

The SONiC festival, presented by the American Composers Orchestra, begins on Oct. 15, with a concert by the Music from Copland House ensemble.

Illustration by Jing Wei

To attempt broad statements about what the youngest generations of composers are thinking is to risk producing something like one of those cringe-inducing Sunday think pieces about Millennials, Facebook, “Girls,” and selfie sticks. More than eighty composers under the age of forty are featured in the SONiC festival, which will overrun venues across Manhattan and Brooklyn from Oct. 15 to Oct. 23. Is this cohort open to diverse influences, attuned to technology, inclined toward multimedia configurations, and fond of hybridized genres? So suggests the scholar and critic William Robin, in an essay heralding the festival. But he is wary of excessively sweeping claims, as are the composers whom he interviews. “Once you start generalizing,” Hannah Lash says, “the noise in your head becomes greater than the noise of the music, and you stop listening, you just start categorizing.”

Indeed, SONiC—which is curated by Derek Bermel and Anna Clyne, under the aegis of the American Composers Orchestra—seems almost designed to defy categorization. On Oct. 16, the A.C.O. presents four works under the rubric “New York Stories,” but no two stories speak the same language. Angélica Negrón, who shows the influence of the American gamelan master Lou Harrison, has written a piece incorporating eight robotic devices playing percussion. Andy Akiho, in “Tarnished Mirrors,” integrates an impression of steel-pan playing into a nimble, playful contemporary idiom. Judd Greenstein, whose music carries echoes of both minimalism and the American leftist-populist tradition, offers “My City,” a forty-minute setting of words by Walt Whitman, the bard of Brooklyn. And Alex Mincek, a young modernist whose work can suggest disintegrating dance music, is represented by “Continuo,” for string quartet and orchestra, which, while not explicitly New York-inspired, hints at urban dialogue and conflict.

The palette of sounds at SONiC ranges from Renaissance viols to theremins, bicycle sounds, and an iPhone pitch-bending app called the iLophone. Any New York-centric thinking will be challenged by the Dutch ensemble Nieuw Amsterdams Peil, the Mexican group Onix Ensamble, and the Los Angeles collective wild Up—whose favored composers tend to sway between sweet and harsh timbres, with improvisation bridging the gap. On Oct. 18, the JACK Quartet, having performed Mincek’s piece, will host a six-hour marathon, which is likely to deliver a few transitional jolts. The lineup includes Amadeus Regucera’s “if only after you then me,” for voice and violin, whose text is compiled from writings by William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, and Antonin Artaud, with instrumental savagery to match.

The danger in this kind of diverse programming is that it can present listeners with an indigestible smorgasbord of possibilities. Mincek, for one, avoids what he calls “self-aware pluralism”; he wants to savor the collision of multiple sound worlds while preserving an underlying coherence. But every composer pursues that sense of unity in diversity, continuity amid flux. Many generations ago, Beethoven sought the same. ♦